Post 5 of 5 from Mazviita Chirimuuta on The Brain Abstracted (Open Access: MIT Press). The last of this series of posts summarises the conclusions regarding philosophy of science more generally that emerge from this study of simplification in neuroscience. The question of realism may have already occurred to you. …
Commentary from Dimitri Coelho Mollo on today’s post from Mazviita Chirimuuta on The Brain Abstracted (MIT Press). I was lucky to have had the chance to discuss this brilliant book with Mazviita Chirimuuta and others while it was still in preparation, and I’m looking forward to exchanging ideas about it …
Post 4 of 5 from Mazviita Chirimuuta on The Brain Abstracted (Open Access: MIT Press). A central claim of the book is that recognition of the challenge of brain complexity — how it places pressure on scientists to devise experimental methods, theories and models, which drastically cut down the apparent …
Commentary from Carrie Figdor on today’s post from Mazviita Chirimuuta on The Brain Abstracted (MIT Press). The animating idea of Chirimuuta’s book is that science, and neuroscience in particular, must engage in simplification in order to explain a complex world. The epistemic dangers of taking the outcomes of simplification strategies …
Post 3 of 5 from Mazviita Chirimuuta on The Brain Abstracted (Open Access: MIT Press). In the previous post I described how the literal interpretation of neurocomputational models encourages us to attend only to the perceived commonalities between brains and computers and to relegate the differences to the periphery of …
Commentary from Mark Sprevak on today’s post from Mazviita Chirimuuta on The Brain Abstracted (MIT Press). I very much agree with the book’s main claim that abstraction and simplification are essential theoretical virtues in the cognitive and brain sciences. Often a simple model – one good enough for our specific …
Post 2 of 5 from Mazviita Chirimuuta on The Brain Abstracted (Open Access: MIT Press). The idea in my project to foreground the question of interpretation is loosely inspired by work in the philosophy of physics which takes the empirical success of e.g. quantum field theory for granted but debates …
